use your balloons for a real purpose.’ That’s all it took for me to agree. My father’s approval was the price of my soul. And I was too ashamed to tell you. That alone should have warned me.” His mouth worked, as if the words were bitter to speak. “But even saying I did it for my father is one more lie. I did it for myself.”
Oh, Lazare. “Do you remember how hard I tried to sell my father’s pamphlets? I thought that was what I was supposed to do. That what my father thought was best. He wasn’t even alive, Lazare, and still I wished to please him.” But the girls’ desperate need had changed that.
Magic had changed it.
“So you understand why I must go?” Hope softened the desperate lines of his face. “I don’t want to be the person my father believes me to be. Someone who cares nothing for science but dreams of a medal on his shirt. A clap on the back that makes him feel secure in knowing his place.”
“But this is too dangerous,” she pleaded. “Not just the journey over the Channel, which you know aeronauts have died attempting. You’ll be harboring people wanted by the police. They will come for you!”
“They will not know anything about it,” he said quietly. “Who would tell them? No one knows but you, me, and the Cazalès.” He reached out a hand to her. “If I don’t take them, who would I be to you? You say you want me to stay, but if I did you would slowly begin to despise me. You are too noble—”
“Too noble?” she heard herself say. “You don’t know who I am if you think that.”
In the silence she heard the clock ticking, fast as wings.
“Camille? Say something.” He seemed stricken, as if he might weep. “What do you mean? Who do you think you are?”
Who was she? She no longer knew. She was becoming … something else. Someone else. Magic was an acrid seed, like the gnarled pip of an orange planted deep inside her long before she’d known it was there. She had watered it with her sorrows, and now whatever this tree would be had threaded its stems and branches through her. It had produced words and pamphlets and changes in opinion. What other fruit would it bear?
She didn’t know.
It was frightening not to know. But neither could she pull it out.
What if she told him the truth?
He might see the wrongness of what he was doing. It would not, she knew, make him love her more. It would make him despise her. But if it kept him alive, did it matter? She let go of the statue’s pedestal, took a step toward him.
“All those successful pamphlets? I printed them with magic! It was with magic that they convinced all of Paris. It was magic—magic I once hated—that raised me up and gave me a voice! You wish to sacrifice yourself by flying the Cazalès over the sea so you can be worthy of me? Whatever Rosier says, I’m not a saint. I am, if anything, the opposite.” The little voice she heard in her head—the voice of that magical seed—whispered: You know what you are.
The room was so quiet she could hear him breathing.
He did not look at her. He only said flatly, “I believed you when you said it was nothing to you.”
It is in me, too deep to unroot. “Lazare, it’s like a fever. I don’t know how to manage it—yet.”
“Yet?” He took a step toward her. “What are you waiting for? You’ve put yourself in terrible danger. If someone were to find out—”
“No one will find out. We are searching for a way to control it.”
There was a shell on the mantel, beside the clock, and he clenched it in his hand. “Who is helping you?”
“Chandon and another magician.” She knew how bad it sounded. How secret. “They’re searching for a book—”
“A book? A book?” For several long minutes, he looked at the shell as if he would smash it. “Tell me, if I asked you to come with me to England, to escape this place, you would say no?”
Bewildered, she asked, “That is what you’ve come to ask me?”
He inclined his head. Beneath his lashes, his beautiful eyes were like dark moons, impossible, unreachable.
“I can’t leave them without finding the answers. And you see how terrible things are for magicians. They need a way out before the borders close, we are close to